How The Witcher 3’s Inventory Hurts Its Role-playing
Inventory and encumbrance systems have been a staple of multiple game genres, most notably role-playing games, since their inception. Dozens of different approaches have yielded just as many divergent results, to varying degrees of success. Today, I want to talk about how these systems interact with role-playing, with one particular game as a centerpiece. Let’s set the scene.
I ride into town, wary of the uncertain location. Making my way past the locals, I approach the innkeeper to buy some supplies. The events of the past mere minutes are fresh in my mind. I barely survived being attacked by vicious corpse-eaters on the side of the road, and dug into my meager ration of apples to replenish my strength. I view his selection carefully. The apples are cheap, but aren’t good for much, water is more effective but more expensive, and it takes longer. I peer into my near-empty coin-purse, and weigh my choice carefully.
Yup, it’s CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3. Specifically, my first experience with the inventory system while acquiring some healing items. Having decided to play on the second highest difficulty to start, this opening encouraged me. This was what I wanted. The more grounded, even grittier take on the Witcher that the trailers promised, now in open world! With exploration now truly in my hands, survival was not guaranteed.

I would need to keep my wits about me, take stock of the situation, and know when to run. I am a lonely mutant set loose upon this wretched world, I can depend on nobody but myself, and I will need to be every bit as ruthless as can be to make my coin. This opening section was to be the first of many hard monetary situations that would encourage me to be cruel unto people to squeeze every last crown out of them. My better nature prevailed now, but when again would I be tested?
It never happened again.
In spite of the game’s many other evident successes, the way inventory works in TW3 is not conducive to role playing. Let’s look at why.
First off, we should define role-playing in this scenario. Unlike many other RPG series (see Elder Scrolls) that allow you to create your own character, TW3 has you inhabit a pre-existing one, Geralt of Rivia, witcher. He’s a well-defined, rounded character, whose personal goals drive the early story. Thus, role playing in this context refers to putting yourself in Geralt’s mindspace, asking yourself, “What Would Geralt Do™?”. The inventory however, does not build on this. Witchers (a caste of mutated monster-slaying warriors) are intended to be despised by the superstitious peasantry, threatened by crusading priests, and all around dirt-poor. It’s not like the game forgot. One of the most memorable side stories in the game concerns another witcher, and what happens when a contract goes very, very wrong.
Unfortunately, this isn’t expressed in the mechanics.
Sure, you can still haggle for every crown when taking on a contract, and you have the occasional dilemma between being upstanding and losing out on your reward, or being ruthless for a paycheck, but the tension is gone quickly when you realize that none of it is really necessary.
This is where the inventory system and the desire to role-play come into conflict. TW3 uses an Elder Scrolls style weight based inventory system, allowing you to carry dozens of items so long as you keep under the limit. It also happens that the items you are rewarded with are routinely more valuable than any monetary reward for completing contracts.
There’s a scene in one of the expansions where Geralt chooses between tipping and shooing off a child courier. It would be a tough moral choice, if, as in the books, Geralt was strapped for cash. But when the player is in control of him, he’s not. By the point in my playthrough where I reached this point, I had well over fifty thousand crowns in the bank, and this was after a conscious effort to not go treasure hunting.


This is also intertwined with how the game rewards you. Besides cash and crafting ingredients, your main form of major reward will be weapons and armor. You can get these items from effectively every chest at the end of a dungeon, contract monsters and guarded chests. The items you find like this are likely to be high tier, and thus, very valuable. But you find so many that they’re not guaranteed to be better than your current equipment, especially not if you are using the current level of witcher gear. Thus, you are likely to collect it, and then sell it to the next smith or armorer you find. Once you start doing this, the money starts piling up fast.
To be fair, the game does have money sinks, very good ones at that. But they’re insufficient. Once you learn the ropes, no amount of expenses can keep you from making more money than you could practically spend. Buying gwent cards? Good to start, but they become relatively cheap as the game goes on. Going back to the armorer for constant repairs? Annoying at first, but they will soon become trivial as you pick up more repair tools than you will ever need. Buying out a tavern’s entire stock of Rivian kriek, going on a bender while streaking across Novigrad and consorting with every courtesan in the city? Not to say I’ve necessarily tried it, but nothing can make a dent in Geralt’s monstrous, massive, insatiable… ahem, income.

It also cheapens the stakes of those big contracts. Not the ones you get from a random peasant, but the game-spanning contracts that drive the main quest and the stories of each expansion. It’s hard to feel as though Geralt is compelled to take on these huge missions when the reward is a tenth of what he made in the process. Zoltan’s get rich quick scheme especially comes off as cheap when Geralt hands over that much to get his armor polished every week.
This isn’t a knock against Witcher 3 in particular. RPG economies are ludicrously difficult to balance, especially the open world ones (see Elder Scrolls). Furthermore CDPR probably prioritized a functioning and more forgiving system over one that could leave players stranded. That being said, here are a few wild suggestions for the future, dedicated to anyone who wants to make their RPG economy feel immersive.
A Few Wild(Hunt) Suggestions
The lack of long term money sinks are a big reason for why player fortunes spiral out of control so quickly. Yet NPCs can’t make it rich so easily. Why? Well, unlike the player, NPCs are bound by the narrative rules of the world. That means room and board, as well as any expenses. You would never have thought that the nomadic, rootless existence of the typical RPG protagonist is the path to riches, but it turns out property ownership is a tactic of the bourgeoisie to keep the proletariat down.
Snark aside, an immersive economy would require bringing these considerations to gameplay. If you want a semi-survivalist take, (think the Frostfall mod for Skyrim) then charging for necessary food and shelter will get the player roleplaying fast. But not all RPGs benefit from survival elements. In their absence, TW3 gets the idea right. Item condition, supplies and the like require that you return to civilization often, to gear back up and take stock of the situation, not just to sell your loot. Here, the tweak that would make you more dependent and considerate of towns is how much you can carry.
While the weight based system is relatively simple to comprehend, it’s also easy to take advantage of it. The stakes drop in combat when you have enough supplies on you refill your potions literally hundreds of times. In its stead, I would suggest the grid based inventory. The first Witcher game employed this system, and while it had no shortage of issues, it successfully disincentivized carrying around a dozen bulky weapons to sell to the next merchant. It also makes more sense than having infinite pocket space.
Further disincentivization could be achieved by tweaking what merchants buy. Sure, an armorer would love to sell you a new cuirass, but they wouldn’t be all too excited about buying one from you. Your local pharmacist wouldn’t be pumped to buy the drugs you made in your basement. Reducing the player’s ability to indiscriminately sell specialty items to anyone but pawnbrokers would mean the world makes a bit more sense. After all, who’s buying Skelliger armor in Toussaint?
Alright, so I’ve talked about what to take out, but we can’t make a good system just by removing elements. We need to fill in the gaps. If we can’t sell our foe’s bloodstained armor to Joe Smith, then how will we make money? More immersive ways of course! With TW3, Geralt’s nominal source of income is monster hunting. This would be less a task of changing the prices of contracts as one of rebalancing the economy as a whole to allow the player to get through the game primarily on contract money. Not everything needs to within that price range, as witchers are supposed to be poor in general. However, this would place value on events such as brawls and gwent tournaments, where money really is on the line.
Those are the big things to look at in order to make an RPG economy more ‘realistic’. All that being said, I feel the comings-on of a piece on what ‘realism’ means for games, so stay tuned, and follow if you’re interested.